Canva bought AI image generator Leonardo.ai – this will allow it to better compete with Adobe

Australian company Canva has announced its second major acquisition this year – now the company has acquired image generator startup Leonardo.ai. The new asset will help the company compete with Adobe, the leader in the creative software market.

Image source: leonardo.ai

The deal, which took about a month to close, will help Canva integrate image and video generation models into its products. It was the company’s fastest takeover, co-founder Cameron Adams told Bloomberg. In March, it became known that the company bought the Affinity software package, popular among Apple computer owners – then the deal was valued at several hundred million British pounds. The amount of the Leonardo.ai acquisition deal has not been disclosed.

Canva raised funding this year at a valuation of $26 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing creative software companies poised to compete with market leader Adobe. Leonardo.ai has 120 employees – the company has developed a system that allows you to create and generate images based on text queries online.

The startup was founded in 2022 – last year it raised $31 million from Blackbird Ventures, which is listed as an investor and Canva itself. Over the past year and a half, the Leonardo.ai platform has been used to create more than a billion images. Leonardo.ai’s services will join Canva’s suite of AI tools, which the company hopes will lure away some of Adobe’s big clients and accelerate revenue growth.

Founded about a decade ago by Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins, Canva has grown into a potential competitor to Adobe, a company that has dominated software for graphics professionals for years. Adobe recently added AI to its products, but its $20 billion acquisition deal for Figma fell through in December and its shares have fallen more than 10% this year. Investors are considering Canva as a candidate to go public, but specific plans for this have not yet been discussed. The company recently sold $2.5 billion worth of shares.

So far, Canva has announced acquisitions of eight companies, including Affinity, visual AI startup Kaleido.ai, and photo banks Pexels and Pixabay.